Re: IDE, IDL feedback needed.

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

Samuel> The beauty of an IDE based on CORBA is that the IDE doesn't
Samuel> have to worry about the individual pieces, it just has to
Samuel> worry about connecting them all together.

Last year my project (well, there were a few of us) at Cygnus was to
write an IDE based on CORBA.  I think for the most part it works
pretty well.  I definitely think CORBA is the way to go for an
application like this.

I'm not convinced, however, that focusing on an IDE is the best way
to approach things.  For instance, we found ourselves writing several
interfaces (property management, event management, confirmers, etc)
that had nothing to do with the IDE per se.  Instead these interfaces
were generically useful infrastructure that we had to invent simply
because they didn't already exist.  It's sort of like having to invent
the notion of files just to write a compiler.

So I'd really like to see the IDE interfaces just be subclassed off
more generically useful interfaces -- namely, the ones we use to
describe the desktop.  I'd also like to see the IDE share a notion of
events, properties, and whatever else is generically useful, with the
rest of the desktop.

One example of what I mean: if the user asks to edit a file, he
doesn't care if he's running an IDE or not.  He just wants to edit the
file in his preferred environment.

I guess what I'm aiming at is that I'd like to see the level of
integration and ease-of-use so high that you couldn't really say
whether you were running an "IDE" or not -- it would be so seamlessly
integrated with the rest of the Gnome environment that the question
wouldn't really make sense.


This is sort of what I was getting at when I wrote my "starter
interfaces" for Gnome so long ago.  I think you can still get them at
ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/tromey/ (I forget the exact file name).

I think I'll try to resurrect this code at some point in the
not-too-distant future.


I'll try to write up a detailed critique of your proposed IDE
interfaces when I get back from my trip.

Tom